NAZANIN (presented by Lókal)

THURSDAY 27TH AUG || 22:15 - 23:15 || SKUGGI, AUSTURSTRÆTI

Nazanin is a young Iranian woman who fled from Iran after the presidential election in 2009. She was a supporter of Mousavi who ran against president Ahmadinejad. Mousavi was a reformist, advocating democracy and freedom. When Mousavi lost the election, a big part of the nation believed the election was fraud and protested in the streets. Nazanin a university student at the time, was among the protestors. She was arrested and interrogated. Before being sentenced to prison she fled to Turkey and two years later ended up in Iceland as a political refugee.

Nazanin will tell her story in person on stage, how she, a well educated woman, ended up in exile in a far away country up north. She will tell us of how it is being a young woman in Iran, how women are held back and suppressed by the political system. How religion is used to silence women and ignore their rights. She is critical of Islam and the changes that took place in the country after the revolution in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini became the supreme leader and Iran became an Islamic state. The story of Nazanin is similar to her father´s story who fought in the Islamic revolution in 1979, but soon became disilllusioned with the Islamic ideology and has been in and out of jobs ever since. He is a journalist.

The performance is on two levels; On one hand there is Nazanin´s life story and on the other the theatre itself. We play around with these two opposites; reality of life and fiction/stage reality. We refer to real incidents of a Nazanins life, tell her story but we choose what to say and what not. We censor her and sometimes you might not be sure whether she is a performer telling a made up story or whether she is a real person giving a lecture. We transfer the censorship of Iran to the censorship of the theatre. On stage we decide what we say and how we say it. We decide what is real and what is not and hopefully the audience will never be quite sure either.